Story Collections Satisfy The Quest For Fine Writing

July 16, 1986|By Reviewed by Nancy Pate, Sentinel Book Critic

In his introduction to this year's edition of The O. Henry Awards, longtime series editor William Abrahams discusses the current renaissance of the short story. He rightly points out that it is more of a publishing phenomenon than a literary one. Writers have been writing good short stories for years; it's the publishers who are waking up again to the form's potential to please readers. The World of the Short Story provides ample evidence to support Abrahams' viewpoint. Here are 62 stories by writers from 16 countries selected by the noted anthologist Clifton Fadiman. The authors represented range from the early ''moderns'' (D.H. Lawrence, Colette) to acknowledged masters of the genre (Katherine Anne Porter, Isaac Bashevis Singer, John Cheever) to current stylists (John Updike, Raymond Carver).

Fadiman briefly introduces each author and story in turn, and his remarks are generally incisive. He confesses that he finds William Trevor ''the finest short story writer currently using our language'' and presents Trevor's ''A Complicated Nature'' as a sterling example. And although he attempts to include stories not generally found in other collections, Fadiman does fall back on F. Scott Fitzgerald's wonderful but widely anthologized ''Babylon Revisited.'' Fadiman finds most of Fitzgerald's other short stories ''ephemeral.''

Readers may not always agree with Fadiman's opinions or choices, but they will hardly argue with the volume as a whole. It's a rich collection of multifaceted gems. In ''The Hitchhiking Game,'' Czech writer Milan Kundera shows us ''fiction . . . suddenly making an assault on real life'' when two lovers assume unexpected roles. Peter Taylor be-

stows ''The Gift of the Prodigal,'' in which an old man outwardly bemoans and secretly relishes the antics of his black-sheep son. Without mentioning the words ''concentration camp'' or ''Nazi,'' Cynthia Ozick indelibly imprints the horrors of the Holocaust on ''The Shawl.''

Ozick won the O. Henry Prize several years ago with ''The Shawl.'' This year's winner in Prize Stories 1986 is Alice Walker's ''Kindred Spirits.'' A black woman, Rosa, whose white husband has left her, travels to Miami with her older sister, once her close friend, now almost a stranger. The trip is something of a pilgrimage for Rosa, who didn't make it home for her grandfather's funeral. Now she is trying to understand his influence on her life, why she is so much like him, how she feels about others in the family. ''At what point, she wondered, did you lose connection with the people you loved?''

Several other stories also deal with the complicated connections that family members forge with one another. The narrator of Peter Meinke's ''Uncle George and Uncle Stefan'' remembers back to Brooklyn before World War II, when she was a young girl. George was her father's brother; Stefan her mother's twin. Unrelated, they were inseparable until the war, when Polish Stefan couldn't help but voice his sentiments to German George, and a nasty fight ensued.

In Elizabeth Spencer's ''The Cousins,'' a Southern widow visits her cousin, Eric, in Italy and recalls the fateful European trip the two made with three other young relatives years before. It's a story full of warmth, with some of the spaciousness of a novel. Flashbacks are interspersed with present- day conversations between the cousins, who are as tentative as ever about their feelings for family and one another.

Stuart Dybek's ''Pet Milk'' is more an evocation of a particular time -- when the narrator was young and in love -- than a conventional story. But it has a wonderfully satisfying last line that completely justifies the story. In Greg Johnson's ''Crazy Ladies,'' the narrator recalls an incident from his Southern boyhood, when a mad old woman paid a visit to his grandmother. In the kitchen with his father, he asks, ''Is it always the ladies who go crazy?'' voicing his childhood fear that Mrs. Longworth's madness will somehow communicate itself to the women in his family.

As with The World of the Short Story, fans of both short stories and good writing will be more than satisfied with Prize Stories 1986.